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Toy Story
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The
animated feature Toy Story starts
with a flurry of intricate and imaginative surprises. The first jokes of the
film play on the hilarious difference between toys in their apparently real
state – brittle, floppy, inexpressive – and then in their actual state, alive
and bopping as soon as their young, human owner is out of the room.
Throughout
this entire opening sequence, we see glimpses of the boy in question – a hand,
a leg. He looks real enough, and we assume he is an actor caught in live
motion, mixed into the animation. But finally, when he is fully revealed, we
realise that he too is a fully imagined creature, courtesy of the computer
technology of Pixar Animation Studios (famous for its groundbreaking short Tin Toy).
This is a
classic example of what is called two-tier entertainment. To child viewers it offers a familiar but heartening parable.
Woody, an old-fashioned cowboy toy, is the beloved leader of the toys belonging
to young Andy. Woody's reign is challenged, however, by the arrival of the
new-fangled space-toy Buzz. Feeling neglected and excluded, Woody decides to
knock Buzz out a nearby window – and then the adventure really begins.
Buzz, for
his part, suffers a delusion common in children's fiction: he believes he is
something he is not, an astronaut with actual powers of flight and technological
marvels embedded in every inch of his ersatz spacesuit. Such dreams (which can
be either inspirational or destructive) pop up often in Little Golden Books, and indeed in Babe (1995).
To adult
viewers, Toy Story offers many smart,
sassy laughs about the consumer society, cultural fads, and the truly alien
world of children's play. Where Andy is the good boy of the story, his
neighbour Scud is the bad boy – and his toy collection is a carnival of
mutated, macabre figures worthy of the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer.
Of course,
in reality, I believe these tiers of viewing experience are hardly so discrete.
I do not doubt that some children will adore the pop jokes and the gothic
touches in Toy Story as much as (if
not more than) the more sanitised, morally instructive stuff. And adults,
despite their years of arduous cultivation, will certainly find themselves
drawn in by the film's sentimentality and its proudly silly, burlesque humour.
I have
often resisted the laborious, mechanical, slightly creepy and zombie-esque look
of much computer animation. Toy Story overcame my resistance effortlessly – partly because it is so well-crafted, and
partly also because it embraces and exploits the very unreality of this
technique.
The
voice-work is terrific: Tom Hanks (as Woody) and Tim Allen (Buzz) give better
performances on this soundtrack than they usually do in the flesh. I did
wonder, however, about the appropriateness of Randy Newman's songs – doubtless
another concession to adult taste – with their vague, abstract, rhetorical
gesturing towards experiences of love, friendship, disappointment and heroism.
But there
is no doubting the abundant pleasure to be had from this winning film.
MORE Pixar: Finding Nemo, Ratatouille MORE Lasseter: A Bug's Life
© Adrian Martin December 1995 |
